Proposed changes to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act have become a key flashpoint of controversy in the advancing effort to reform the Dodd-Frank Act. The Senate last week passed legislation that would exempt depository institutions that have relatively small mortgage operations from new HMDA disclosure requirements – and some existing ones – that were mandated by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The expanded HMDA reporting regime is taking effect for mortgage (include one data chart) ...
Hensarling is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, which means any Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac reform bill must first go through his panel, whether he’s the author or not.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both saw significant declines in the volume of defective loans that sellers had to repurchase from mortgage-backed securities pools last year, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis. Mortgage sellers in 2017 repurchased – or made other indemnifications for defects – for just $973.5 million of single-family loans from Fannie and Freddie MBS. It was the lowest annual total since the two GSEs began filing quarterly repurchase disclosures with the Securities and Exchange Commission back in 2012. Buyback volume fell 11.6 percent from the 2016 total, including an 11.4 percent drop from the third to the fourth quarter of last year.
Most experts agree that passing housing-finance reform legislation in 2018 now looks improbable, leaving the immediate future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the hands of the Treasury Department and the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Researchers at the Urban Institute say that if legislation remains stalled, the two GSEs could be placed into receivership and reconstituted. Laurie Goodman, director of UI’s Housing Finance Policy Center, said Fannie and Freddie could be wound down within five years, under the Housing and Economic Recovery Act, and be replaced by new entities with no government backstop. She noted that this scenario would leave the fate of government support for the GSEs’ legacy mortgage-backed securities unclear.
Freddie Mac this week rolled out a pilot program that aims to lay off credit risk on mortgages it buys to a group of offshore insurance firms, using Arch Capital Group as a conduit and manager. Initially, 12 lenders will be part of the program, including Freedom Mortgage, the nation’s fifth largest originator overall. Arch is the parent company of the nation’s largest private mortgage insurer. Industry sources told Inside The GSEs that Fannie Mae is working on a similar pilot, but details were sketchy. A Fannie spokesman would only say, “It’s a bit premature to comment.” And a source close to the matter added that Fannie is “always looking for innovative ways” to reduce risk.
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